Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris

“It doesn’t interest me to manipulate the French. I’m not keyed in to their value system. Because they are not my people, their imagined praise of condemnation means nothing to me. Paris, it seems, is where I’ve come to dream about America” (263).

Sedaris' experience living in Paris seems to reverberate with these kind of moments; he is able to spend his days watching American movies in a way he could not in America, is given free reign to judge his fellow Americans visiting Paris, and finds that the distance grants him a different, and largely more interesting, perspective on his homeland. 

Sedaris' clumsy grasp of the French language as well as his deep-rooted sense of "Americanness" separates himself from the French people just as surely as his decision to live abroad separates him from his countrymen. Observing from some indefinable middle ground, Sedaris can be simultaneously scathing and sympathetic, fully indiscriminate in his determination to poke fun at himself and those around him. This extends to his "dreams about America" that can only flourish apart from it; the detachment he gains by living in France seems to clarify something about America for him. While at times the valiant idea of "American optimism" becomes the victim of his wit, there is a decided preoccupation with America and Americanness, and being in Paris only serves to magnify its presence in his life. 

How can we read this preoccupation, especially in light of his decision to remain in Paris? In what way does living life as an expatriate allow Sedaris to "dream about" and experience America in ways that he could not when actually living there?

Paris to the Moon, Adam Gopnik

"Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed—mysterious, uninviting" (7).

This description of Paris is inherently paradoxical, and further more, Gopnik is aware of this, admitting that it is "strange" to describe something as both open and closed, emotional yet enigmatic. In what way is this sense of paradox reflected in Gopnik's essays, as well as in the other texts we have explored throughout the semester? Do the relationships and character developments within these works mirror this enigma, and how can an exploration of the dynamics of Paris illuminate our analysis?

Gopnik's main draw towards Paris is an idealized one, and in this way his perspective on the city is colored by romanticism. Is it this romanticism that creates the personification of someone "wearing their heart on their sleeve," or does Paris indeed lend itself to that type of characterization? How can we use our prior readings to discover the true nature of Paris, and of the American experience within that sphere?

Dreaming in French, Alice Kaplan

"France gave each of these women a deep and lasting confidence, confirmed their spirit of adventure and guaranteed their freedom from home constraints."

Dreaming in French is principally an exploration of what Kaplan calls the "fantasy" of France. What is it about France, and Paris in particular, that is so fantastical to the expatriates that were (and continue to be) drawn there?  For the three women discussed in this text, what is in about France and French culture that cultivates this "confidence" and "freedom," and how does it contrast so starkly against the culture they leave behind in America? In the same way, how does learning and speaking French create dimensions within the lives of each woman? Jacqueline Bouvier emphasizes the "Frenchness" of her name in much the same way that her ancestors romanticized their origins. For Sontag, "much of her own power and prestige in the United States — her aura — was connected to what she learned, then learned to transmit, from France." 

What are the implications of this American romanticization of Paris (something that Baldwin discusses in his essays in Notes of a Native Son), and what can it reveal about the individuals presented as well as the disparate cultures of each place?

Giovanni's Room, James Baldwin

"I'm sort of queer for girls myself." (Part I, Ch. 2)

What are the implications of David referring to his attraction to women as "queer," particularly in the context of Guilluame's bar? Virtually all of the men in the novel are homosexual, which creates an interesting backdrop and distorts society's (as well as David's) adherence to heteronormativity. In this sphere, a man's interest in women is queer, while an interest in other men is standard and accepted behavior.

Queer is not a synonym for gay; rather, it represents the idea that sexual/gender identities are not fixed and do not determine who we are. In this way, David's inversion of normative sexuality in this statement makes sense. Yet there are certain implications of choosing to subvert typical definitions of "queerness" that seem to contradict David's denial and repression of his sexuality for a large portion of the text. Is he merely playing along in order to fit in with the scene at the gay bar? What are his motivations for ascribing to a non-heteronormative perspective in this scene, and how do they affect the novel's perspective as a whole?

Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Talk is men. When I talk I say to myself that I am probably Dick. Already I have even been my son, remembering how wise and slow he is. Sometimes I am Doctor Dohmler and one time I may even be an aspect of you, Tommy Barban." 

Nicole Diver is the only character that gets a chance at first person narration. This affords us a glimpse into her character that we are not given with the other figures of the novel.

I find it interesting that she acknowledges that even (or perhaps especially) in moments of solitude, she is not herself. Her inner monologue is controlled by men, just as her life and certainly her psyche have been controlled by the actions of the men around her. 

What are the implications of Fitzgerald privileging Nicole over the other characters in this way? The insights we as readers are given is complicated by the fact that Nicole has been diagnosed as a schizophrenic. Can we believe her narration? If "talk is men," who is she speaking as in these passages? 

A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway

"All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife -- second class -- and the hotel where Verlaine had died where I had a room on the top floor where I worked" (4).

As A Moveable Feast is a narrative focused on Hemingway’s youth, early relationships, and his development as a writer, I though it only fitting to explore how his writing in this text hints at that growth and how his relationship with Gertrude Stein and early methods of writing informed his stylistic and rhetorical choices. In doing so, I found myself drawn to several interpretations of Hemingway’s writing as reminiscent of the Cubism movement in art. Like Cubist painters, Hemingway is not bound to copying traditional form; instead, he presents a new reality by fragmenting sentences and phrases. A large portion of the novel is dedicated to exploring Hemingway’s relationship with Gertrude Stein, who was perhaps the most successful of "Cubist" writers. She manipulated the English language in such a way that its end results reflected those of modernist painters. Hemingway’s style was almost certainly influenced by the time he spent with Stein, and that influence can be seen in A Moveable Feast; the text is defined by Hemingway’s careful enjambment of descriptive language and commentary, and seemingly innocuous and insignificant observations broken up by pointed interpretation (as seen in the sentence above). 

The passage above is a perfect example of Hemingway's definitive use of simple but often difficult to decipher sentences. This example is emblematic of the deceiving simplicity of his sentence structure; unadorned, seemingly arbitrary observations interspersed with reflection. 

By looking at the similarities between what modernist artists like Picasso were attempting to do with image and what writers like Hemingway and Stein were doing with language, can we consider Hemingway to be a “Cubist” writer? How does his abstract narrative style incorporate elements of Cubism?

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein

"Hemingway, remarks are not literature."

It seems to me that the strength of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas lies in the power of its remarks - on Gertrude Stein herself, on the writers and artists she came in contact with, and on the nature of writing and its relationship with conversation. Remarks may not be literature, but this book seems to be an attempt to make them precisely that. Stein's genius lies in her ability to create complexity and poetry by exploring the interplay between conversational and written English. The story unfolds like a conversation between Toklas and Stein, and is all the more rich and dynamic for it. The style is a variant of Stein's own vernacular, and while the observations of the text may not be merely "remarks" without substance, there is a definite relationship between casual conversation and the commentary that exists within this pseudo-autobiography. At one point Stein (speaking as Toklas) maintains that "Stein said commas were unnecessary, the sense should be intrinsic and not have to be explained by commas and otherwise commas were only a sign that one should pause and take breath but one should know of oneself when one wanted to pause and take breath," once again creating a parallel between the spoken and written word.

How are we to understand this discrepancy between Stein's words of advice to Hemingway and her own writing, and how does it influence our interpretation of the text?